Once again, Varanduil's pressing, invasive touches weren't reprimanded, Cullen not so much as twitching, though Varanduil's hot saliva and dragging tongue must've stung on his opened flesh. Likewise, he did not stop and wait, or even glance back when the bronze creature faltered, and the little wretch was grateful. It was a kindness to Varanduil's limping ego that those clear, cold eyes hadn't seen the raw look on his face then.

The unearthly beast was a welcome distraction, though as he glanced to his leader in the midst of his eagerness to check his expression, he was struck again with that fast-familiar sensation of something driven through his innards when he found Cullen’s eyes drag over to meet his own and a flicker of something like amusement ripple across his cool face. Far from embarrassed, it lit threads of fire through his veins and gouts of sparks rushing up his arteries, and, emboldened, he slid away from Cullen’s gilded side. He listened to the stranger- to Kendry, a name like clanging bells- speak as he eased around his massive silhouette, examining him and noticing, with a thrill of utter delight, that Kendry’s ear was listening to him in turn, attentively following the faint sound of his soft footfalls. Did it, he wondered, unsettle this huge, powerful beast of myth to have Varanduil at his back..? What, he wanted to know, was that face, hot as fresh cream, doing right now..?

Kendry’s words were equally difficult to suss out. His tone bordered on friendly, his deep voice approachable- innocently insulting. Heart racing with sudden excitement, Varanduil’s gaze swiftly flicked from the ear that Kendry was devoting to him to the sleek planes and angles of Cullen’s stark-white face beyond him, starving to see what reaction this would pull from him. He wasn’t disappointed. Rather than anger, a cold stillness had swept his golden leader’s body, and once again Varanduil thought of that dark, still pool whose end he couldn’t see, whose thoughts were merely a suggestion of teeth and slithering, eel-like bodies not quite visible in the blackness.

A bachelor Cullen didn’t know- now that was interesting.

It was a conversation Varanduil had no place in- it would have been polite to excuse himself. Just as it would have been polite to introduce himself. -He didn’t leave, too enraptured by Cullen’s brutally stiff figure and the hard muscle standing out along his proud, bloody throat; too flattered by the careful attention of the dainty ear Kendry kept on him, as if he, Varanduil, was a threat to this massive myth. He let out a low, stuttering breath of excitement, trying to rein in the glee in his voice, turning the silky chords of it straining.

“I believe,” he murmured, speaking to Cullen, though his dark, shining eyes were fixated on the back of Kendry’s pearly head, “he said that he is a bachelor.” Slithering a single step closer, not quite close enough to touch the swell of Kendry’s snow-dusted rump with his nose if he stretched, he added, with great innocence, “I suppose boldness can be an admirable quality...”